Mouthful

What in the world are you eating?

Industrial Bacon Flu

29 April 2009 | 1:08 - By Phil Lees

The virus that threatens the bacon supply.


Swine flu must be serious; it’s killed one thirtieth the number of people that malaria kills every day. Nonetheless, this virus has spread from an edible animal to humans and then human to human. Should I be surprised that people take an infectious disease more seriously when it threatens the bacon supply rather than people somewhere tropical and poverty-stricken?

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 I'm not really that keen on fermented crabs.


I’m suspicious of people with food allergies even though rationally, they do exist. I’ve seen people turn a shade of vermillion after eating shellfish and bloat after lactose. I doubt that sort of reaction is psychophysiological and if it is, I’m surprised that the brain could play that type of grim trick on the body.

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Gentrifying Markets in Hong Kong

15 April 2009 | 18:13 - By Phil Lees

 Does market architecture matter?


Many of the wet market buildings in Asia seem built as an architectural tribute to the centrality of food in their respective cultures. Wan Chai Market in Hong Kong was no different.

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30 Ingredients

08 April 2009 | 15:40 - By Phil Lees

Maybe there is a logarithmic scale where dishes reach their absolute ingredient limit; bending and breaking under the sheer weight and imbalance of their components. That limit is stretched by biryani.


There are some suburban housewives whom have wrought a successful career pimping 4 ingredient cookbooks; and although I'd say that I've had a fairly wide exposure to food over my lifetime, I could name but 4 dishes worth eating that contain just 4 ingredients. At least, dishes where I felt like I had cooked rather than combined.

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 How do we legislate on flavour?


Two weeks ago, the results of the new alcopops tax came in. The attempts at revenue raising fell miserably short of the estimated 38 million dollar windfall. The Government raised a mere $9000.

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About this Blog

A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.

Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.

In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.

Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth.

 
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